The Code of the Mountains Part 19

The trader laughed.

"Wuss then thet. This country's a-goin' ter declare war on Spain." He made the announcement with the superior air of one in touch with large and distant affairs.

"Who's Spain?" Newt Spooner put the question gravely and with no sense of betraying untoward ignorance. In the log school-house years ago he might have been told the answer to that question, but such matters had since then escaped his attention.

"Spain," enlightened the trader, whose geographical ideas had also until recently been vague, "is a country in ther other world--you has to go acrost the ocean ter git thar."

"Who lives thar?" inquired the lad.

"Hit's a country of outlanders."

Newt stood for a moment gazing across the dreary wastes of broken ridges.

"Well," he said calmly, "I reckon we kin go over thar an' lick 'em, ef need be."

But, if the fever came slowly to the hills, it infected the men of the two new companies thoroughly enough when it did come. So far, each organization was drilling in its own territory, and, when the boy thought of Henry Falkins, it was not in connection with the war with Spain, but as the princ.i.p.al enemy in another war. On the lintel of the cabin door was a series of notches cut by his pocket-knife. Each month he added a fresh one at the end of the line. When he had cut twelve, he would have complied with his promise to the Deacon, and would once more tramp across the mountains on the mission which had been too often thwarted. Already there were seven of these cryptic reminders, and in a few days more the eighth would be added.

Minerva came and went, and Newt at first spoke to her as little as possible; but, when the other women of the family nagged her, he rose fiercely to her defense. The girl sought by gentleness and diplomacy to win him back to open friendship, but he held sullenly aloof.

At last, she said:

"Newty, can't we be friends again? Even if you can't understand what I did, can't you believe me when I say I did it as much for you as for him?"

He stood twisting his brogan toe in the hard-tramped dirt of the cabin yard. His face was expressionless. He looked at her, and turned away his face, while over it went a spasm of pain.

"I reckons what ye did appeared right ter ye, M'nervy," he generously acceded. "I reckon I've got more quarrel with them new-fangled notions they l'arns ye down thar at ther college then what I hev with you. They aimed ter l'arn me them same things at ther penitenshery--but I wasn't ter be corrupted. But all I kin see is thet ye warned my enemy, an' thet ye made common cause with him ergin me."

On the fourth of next July, Newt was going to have a celebration all his own. In his "marked-down" enemy, Newt saw a man whom he had never injured and who had, with smug hypocrisy, attacked him in a cowardly manner and made a felon of him. In his diseased imagination he pictured Falkins gloating over this triumph. That score he meant to settle. It was simple and immutable.

Then came the day when once more the company from Troublesome hiked across the hills to Jackson. Once more the college students were drawn up at the palings to see them pa.s.s. Again they marched raggedly, but their faces, instead of being good-humored and full of frolic, were serious now. They were leaving the only country they had ever known.

They were going to cross the ocean, and invade a land as foreign to their conceptions and ken as a continent on Mars.

Minerva Rawlins was leaning across the fence, and, as Newt pa.s.sed her, he caught once more the flutter of her handkerchief. There was no leave-taking, and she did not know that, as he left the cabin that morning, his last words had been a warning to his mother and sister, that, if they "pestered Clem's gal" while he was away, he would hold them strictly to account on his return.

At the railroad station in Jackson, the outfit was joined by the other company; but, as Newt stood on the platform, his eyes somberly searching the s.p.a.ce where the men were gathered, he sought vainly for the figure of Henry Falkins. At last, a corporal told him that the first lieutenant was in command, and Newt made no audible comment. But to himself he said:

"I reckon the d.a.m.n' coward was skeered ter come along. He kain't fight Spain in no witness-cheer."

CHAPTER XVI

When the two companies from the hills entrained that raw morning they had no idea where they were going or what prospects lay ahead, but they conceived days of action, and fell upon months of dull routine. The mountaineer is restive under discipline and pa.s.sionate in his insistence on personal liberty. He bristles at a curt command. It irks his soul to raise the right hand in salute when he pa.s.ses another whose leggings are of leather instead of canvas and whose shoulders are decorated with certain insignia. To say "sir" in addressing a superior, or to admit any form of superiority, is a harder thing than to march on short rations, for a voice within is always making declaration, "I'm jest as good as any man."

So, the mountain companies did not at once fall into ordered and frictionless a.s.similation in the big military machine--did not at once become anonymous units. Yet even in the feud, men acknowledged the necessity, when need arose, of sinking the personal grievance in obedience to the clan requirement. With officers who failed to understand them and who had not been willing to make haste slowly, they would have become a mob of constant mutineers. But they were a part of a regiment whose peace-footing was two battalions, and whose colonel, though a bluegra.s.s Kentuckian, understood and loved highland and lowland alike. The two Breathitt county companies with another that had marched forty-five miles from over near the Virginia line to entrain, made up one battalion, while the other was from the edge of the bluegra.s.s. When he joined his bearded barbarians at Chickamauga, Colonel Burford smiled happily. To him they were big-boned children, but he nursed them along and taught them that the swift, military obedience asked of them was not a concession to individuals, but to abstract efficiency, and that this efficiency was their own chief interest. So, they came with astounding haste into a full acceptance of the necessity. They were still raw and looked like half-barbaric allies from the hinterland--as they were. They wore their shirt-tails out like Chinamen on the long and dusty hikes, and their service hats tilted at a dozen disreputable angles. They still bantered each other in quaint Elizabethan English drawled in nasal tones, but also they watched with keen, unblinking eyes the machine-like evenness of the regulars, which it became their care, with swift absorption, to imitate. They were the Second battalion of the Fifth Kentucky, but they were better known as the "Shirt-tail battalion," and their far-seeing colonel seemed, on the whole, contented with them.

When other commands complained and sulked in the Georgia climate, and crowded the hospitals, these mountaineers throve and said nothing. To them the army ration was an improvement over their accustomed fare. On kitchen detail they scowled, but served with stoicism--though "sich-like was women's work"--and, when they went out as provost guardsmen to round up the recalcitrant, they brought back their prisoners with business-like despatch. Though they were seeing a new life, every detail of which was wonderful to them, no sign or exclamation of surprise escaped their bearded lips. The Kentucky mountaineer might walk through the Champs Elysees of Paris, battered, threadbare and ignorant, but he would carry his head high and gaze straight at every man, eye to eye, giving no indication that any sight was new or unaccustomed.

Out on the target-range a detachment was at work one day mastering the problems of long-range fire with sadly inefficient rifles. It was shortly after their arrival at Chickamauga, and Newt Spooner had just fallen back, his Springfield still smoking with the black powder of its discharge. He had scored a "bull," and his thin lips were gravely pleased. Over the sultry area of the mobilization camp went the roar and activity of war-preparation. Newly commissioned staff officers galloped importantly from headquarters to headquarters. Mule trains and commissariat-wagons rumbled noisily under yellow clouds of following dust. Lines upon lines of company streets stretched away in a spread of canvas with the locales of commands marked by brigade and regimental colors; brazen mingling of shouts and bugles set to it its accompaniment of sound.

As Newt Spooner walked back, throwing open the breach of his piece, his eyes fell on a new figure, which wore its uniform with as soldierly a jauntiness as though it had never been accustomed to "cits." The face was already bronzed, and the gauntleted hands rested on the saber-belt.

The man was Henry Falkins, and on his shoulder-straps and collar-ornaments were not the twin bars of a captain, but the oak leaves of a major.

Newt, falling back toward the little group of his fellows who sat cross-legged in the meager shadow of a tent-flap, halted suddenly and stood for a moment transfixed. Then his hand stole to his ammunition-belt, and toyed there with a cartridge. His face paled and hardened. So, after all, his enemy had not stayed at home.

Falkins looked up, and saw the soldier. He saw the att.i.tude, and the venomous hatred of the narrowed eyes, and the itching twitch of the fingers at the cartridge-belt, and he knew then that his most dangerous enemy would not be always at his front. But he nodded to the boy, and said casually:

"Spooner, that last shot was a neat one."

The private did not answer. He did not salute, he did not move. He only stood and glared. Henry Falkins turned his back on the potential a.s.sa.s.sin, and strolled deliberately away. But the Deacon, now "top-Sergeant" of B Company came over to the boy--who had taken one step as if to follow Falkins--and stepped between.

"Son," he said in a low voice, while his eyes were very steady and quieting in their hypnotic quality, "your year ain't up yet--not by several months. I reckon until the fourth of next July, you'd better not let your face give you away like that. It's bad business in the army."

The boy fell suddenly trembling with the reaction of his temptation. For an instant, forgetful of his pledge, he had fully meant to shoot. Now, he turned and walked back toward the group of seated comrades. After a while, he inquired in a normal voice:

"What's Henry Falkins a-doin' with them major's leaves on his shoulder-straps? He hain't nothin' but captain of A Company. I thought he'd done stayed at home."

"He got here yesterday," enlightened the first sergeant. "He was sent away about something, an' he wears a major's straps because he's commandin' this battalion."

"Ye mean"--Newt leaned pa.s.sionately forward, and, in his bared fore-arms, the muscles stood out corded--"ye mean thet Henry Falkins is a-bossin' _us_?"

The Deacon nodded. Then he added, in a carefully lowered voice:

"Bide your time, son. It'll keep, an' we've got Spain on our hands first."

But the weeks pa.s.sed, and the Shirt-tail battalion was no nearer Cuba, though it was much nearer efficiency for the field. Other commands left for Tampa and the front. Seemingly forgotten, regiments and brigades drilled and waited and fretted at Chickamauga until disgust came in the stead of ardor and hope of active service languished, and the mountaineers alone remained patient.

The Deacon was cut out for handling men, and was winning the name of an unusually efficient top-sergeant. With his experience in the outside world, he seemed a wise and capable shepherd going in and out among his sheep.

At last came orders. The command was to move, but instead of moving toward Tampa and Cuba, where the fighting had been, it was to take train across the continent, and join other waiting thousands at San Francisco, remote from the theater of war. The bluegra.s.s troops grumbled afresh, but the men from the mountains kept their peace. They had not enlisted for any particular type of service. The President of the United States had called for men--and they had answered. It was up to the President.

That journey across the continent, across endless prairies and flat plains and into strange surroundings was also a revelation to Newt and his fellows, but they gazed out of the car windows with as little outward evidence of interest as cattle being shipped in box-cars.

And from early June until late in October they sat down and waited at Camp Meritt and the Presidio, drilling and being whipped into shape until it seemed to them that military life was the only life they had known. And between June and October falls the month of July, and in the month of July comes the fourth.

Over Private Newt Spooner's cot in his tent hung a calendar. Each day he carefully marked off a number, and, as he kept track of the time, a strange sort of contentment appeared to descend upon his soul. He studied his drill-manual, threw himself into the life of soldiering, and presented to the world a face less grim and lowering. He was pointed out as a smart, well set-up file.

But beside Private Job Wedgesley, his bunkie, another man in the company had an eye on Private Spooner. At times, when the soldier did not know of it, the top-sergeant of the outfit strolled in and noted the calendar on which the pa.s.sing of each day was so faithfully recorded, and the brain of the top-sergeant dedicated itself to cogitation. On the night of the third, Sergeant Peter Spooner asked and was given permission to speak privately with his major.

The tall grave figure with the thoughtful eyes and the chevroned sleeve was a picture of soldierly deportment, and, as he came into the tent of Major Henry Falkins and stood respectfully at attention, the battalion commander looked up, with a pleased smile.

"I have the captain's permission to speak to the major, sir," announced the infantry-man.

Falkins nodded.

"To-morrow is the Fourth of July, sir."